Iron Fertilization News

Saturday, September 30, 2006

Convert Crop Waste to Char, Put in Soil

One of the simpler methods of sequestering carbon is to manage farmlands intelligently, so that more carbon dioxide is retained in the soil. We've talked about this technique before.

However, there is a way of increasing the sequestration level significantly. According to this article in Nature, the simple technique of converting leftover biomass into charcoal and then plowing the charcoal into the ground, can do wonders. And it increases soil fertility as well.

Pumping liquid carbon dioxide underground on a massive scale so it won't contribute to global warming has been talked about for years. ­Howard Herzog, an MIT chemical engineer and the program manager of the Carbon Sequestration Initiative, an industrial consortium, says the most recent international conference on the subject--in Trondheim, Norway, earlier this year--made clear two things: First, the geological questions are being resolved favorably. Second, without policies that put a price on CO2, it's unlikely that any sequestration facilities will actually get built.

The uncertainty surrounding climate change argues for action, not inaction. America should lead the way.

FOR most of the Earth's history, the planet has been either very cold, by our standards, or very hot. Fifty million years ago there was no ice on the poles and crocodiles lived in Wyoming. Eighteen thousand years ago there was ice two miles thick in Scotland and, because of the size of the ice sheets, the sea level was 130m lower. Ice-core studies show that in some places dramatic changes happened remarkably swiftly: temperatures rose by as much as 20°C in a decade. Then, 10,000 years ago, the wild fluctuations stopped, and the climate settled down to the balmy, stable state that the world has enjoyed since then. At about that time, perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, mankind started to progress.